WASHINGTON -- Michael DeHart and Greg Read, tourists from Dallas, paid $9 to park their car near the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday morning, found out the museum was closed, ran four blocks in the rain to the National Air and Space Museum, found out that museum was closing, ran back to their car and drove to the Capitol, parked and paid again, and searched for a member of Congress to complain to."We're pretty ticked off," said Mr. DeHart, a pilot. "We come all the way from Texas to see the nation's capital and what do we see?

Maryland officials should get more economic bang from the Wallops Flight Facility — just over the line in Virginia — by capitalizing on space tourism and the potential from unmanned aircraft, according to a new study. The report, commissioned by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's complex on Wallops Island already has an effect on Maryland's Eastern Shore. But there's potential for more. One possibility: attracting more people to see rockets blasted into space from Wallops.

WASHINGTON - "Space Race," a new National Air and Space Museum exhibition, displays the U.S.-Soviet relationship in space from their competition in the 1950s and 1960s to their cooperation in the 1970s.It had its origin in a 1993 auction at which an anonymous American paid $4 million for an array of Soviet artifacts.The anonymous American turned out to be Dallas billionaire Ross Perot, and many of the items he bought are included in the exhibition in the museum's soaring Space Hall."It's an exciting day," Perot said at last week's preview.

Washington Space Shuttle Discovery, National Air and Space Museum The space shuttle Discovery soared around the Washington Monument and the White House in a salute to the nation's capital Tuesday before landing for the last time near its new home at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum annex in northern Virginia. Discovery will be transferred from NASA into the museum's collection at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center on April 19 in an outdoor ceremony open to the public.

During 22 hours of talks at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, negotiators agreed that seven atomic mushroom cloud photographs were too many. Four would do: two from Hiroshima, two from Nagasaki.And the photograph of a badly burned Japanese woman being treated at a Red Cross hospital would be deleted because it was considered too graphic. And the figure of 31,000 Allied troop casualties anticipated in an invasion of Japan would have to be bumped way up, 10 times or more, to accurately reflect the historical record for an exhibit called "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," expected to open next May.The first and only wartime use of atomic weapons had occurred 49 years before, but in a windowless room on the Washington Mall the history was taking shape again.

WASHINGTON -- After 10 years of planning, the Smithsonian Institution will break ground today for the National Museum of the American Indian on the last empty plot on the National Mall, which runs between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.The museum's limestone-clad design -- created in consultation with Indian leaders and shaped to evoke the wind- and water-carved rock formations of the American West -- is expected to contrast sharply with the Greek Revival, Victorian and modern buildings lining the Mall.

SUITLAND -- An unheated, poorly lighted warehouse along a rundown commercial strip seems an unlikely place to find the world's most famous warplane. Yet here the immense bomber's fuselage lies in two pieces without wings or landing gear, not seen publicly in one piece since it dropped the first atomic bomb.Visitors stepping into Building 20 at the National Air and Space Museum's storage and restoration yard encounter first the giant bullet nose of the B-29 Superfortress, looming in dim light like a submarine.

Washington Space Shuttle Discovery, National Air and Space Museum The space shuttle Discovery soared around the Washington Monument and the White House in a salute to the nation's capital Tuesday before landing for the last time near its new home at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum annex in northern Virginia. Discovery will be transferred from NASA into the museum's collection at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center on April 19 in an outdoor ceremony open to the public.

Vacuum tubes and radar components, telecommunications equipment and more electronic gizmos than you could imagine are on display at the Historical Electronics Museum in Linthicum.And now all those gadgets are comfortably housed in 11,000 square feet of a Westinghouse warehouse on West Nursery Road, next to the BWI Marriott at Friendship Square.The museum now has nearly twice as much space as it had at the Westinghouse Electronics Systems Groups offices it used to occupy on Elkridge Landing Road.

Salvatore Joseph "Joe" DeMarco, a commercial artist and former manager of art services for AAI Corp. who was also widely known for his detailed drawings of World War I aircraft, died Friday of lung cancer at Gilchrist Hospice in Towson. The White Marsh resident was 93. The son of a dentist and a homemaker, Mr. DeMarco was born and raised on Lyndhurst Street in West Baltimore. He attended St. Bernadine parochial school and ended his formal education when he was 14. "His father died, and he had to go to work to help support his family.

By Jacques Kelly and Jacques Kelly,jacques.kelly@baltsun.com | January 20, 2010

Friends recall Flores McGarrell as an unforgettable artistic force. A performer at numerous Artscape events, he helped create a live memorial drama after the 1995 burning of the Clipper Mill in Woodberry. His teachers said he was one of the most recognized students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied and taught for nearly a decade. The former Baltimorean, who was leading a Haitian arts center, died Tuesday when he dashed into a collapsing hotel during the earthquake to retrieve a computer that stored his records and artistic concepts.

By Karen Nitkin and Karen Nitkin,Special to The Sun | October 29, 2006

Joppatowne resident Gary High is a Navy man, but these days he's working to restore a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk attack plane that's part of the collection at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum in Middle River. "I just think there are certain things that deserve to be restored," said High as he stripped glue and paint off the plane's canopy. That plane is of particular interest to him because one like it was on the aircraft carrier where he served from 1956 to 1960. "It's kind of my pet project," he said.

WASHINGTON -- After 10 years of planning, the Smithsonian Institution will break ground today for the National Museum of the American Indian on the last empty plot on the National Mall, which runs between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.The museum's limestone-clad design -- created in consultation with Indian leaders and shaped to evoke the wind- and water-carved rock formations of the American West -- is expected to contrast sharply with the Greek Revival, Victorian and modern buildings lining the Mall.

WASHINGTON -- Mayte Greco flies search missions to rescue Cuban exiles, Madge Rutherford Minton flew fighter planes during World War II and 87-year-old Doris Lockness is still flying.Last week they and a dozen other exceptional women pilots met, some for the first time, at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington to mark the opening of an exhibit that is a national bow to the breadth of women's involvement in American aviation over the last 60 years. The show, "Women and Flight," will continue at the museum until Sept.

By Jacques Kelly and Jacques Kelly,jacques.kelly@baltsun.com | January 20, 2010

Friends recall Flores McGarrell as an unforgettable artistic force. A performer at numerous Artscape events, he helped create a live memorial drama after the 1995 burning of the Clipper Mill in Woodberry. His teachers said he was one of the most recognized students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied and taught for nearly a decade. The former Baltimorean, who was leading a Haitian arts center, died Tuesday when he dashed into a collapsing hotel during the earthquake to retrieve a computer that stored his records and artistic concepts.

Maryland officials should get more economic bang from the Wallops Flight Facility — just over the line in Virginia — by capitalizing on space tourism and the potential from unmanned aircraft, according to a new study. The report, commissioned by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's complex on Wallops Island already has an effect on Maryland's Eastern Shore. But there's potential for more. One possibility: attracting more people to see rockets blasted into space from Wallops.

WASHINGTON - "Space Race," a new National Air and Space Museum exhibition, displays the U.S.-Soviet relationship in space from their competition in the 1950s and 1960s to their cooperation in the 1970s.It had its origin in a 1993 auction at which an anonymous American paid $4 million for an array of Soviet artifacts.The anonymous American turned out to be Dallas billionaire Ross Perot, and many of the items he bought are included in the exhibition in the museum's soaring Space Hall."It's an exciting day," Perot said at last week's preview.